The Role of WeQuests in Learning a Foreign/Second Language

Nowadays, young and adult people familiar with technology and they have the technical skills to deal with it in a proper way. There is no more digital immigrants, so the use of technology in the education setting become necessary to involve to engage the learners. Web quest is one tool that can be used to promote the use of technology in the educational setting. According to Bernie Dodge (1995) a web quest is an inquiry oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing."As it is clarified from the definition, students play an active role in the learning process and the teacher is a facilitator has to  provide the students with the all information they need, as well as she should modify the web quest to suit all students' needs. However, Web quests are designed to focus on using information rather than looking for it, and to support learners' thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation; simply, it promote critical thinking. Generally, web quests are cooperative activities where students assume different roles relative to an authentic problem; for that students enjoy web quests because they are given the opportunity to use the Internet to find and apply information. On the other hand, they have to work on a project as a result of what they have been learned from processing the information of a particular web quest. In addition, web quest provides a motivated learning environment for the learners to develop their academic skills and social skills by collaborate and contact with each other in the classroom.

According to the current situation of technology in Saudi Arabia, I will use web quest as a tool to enhance learning in the classroom because it gives the learner the complete chance to learn through things they prefer, not through the textbooks which they are hated more than anything else.